I have a little reminder, a little mantra for us today: To have a healthy life, I need a healthy mind.  After our last discussion about our environment, I really wanted to dive into the environment of the mind.  I was never taught how to control my thoughts as a kid. I grew up under the assumption that our thoughts were simply our thoughts, coming from some source (never really considered what it was) and we had no say in what went through our minds—it was just something that happened.  If they were negative or sad, then I was negative or sad and that was just how it was.  I hated hearing things like snap out of it because I literally felt no control over what went through my head.  I often distracted myself with work and books so I wouldn’t have to deal with anything up there.  I put myself in such a routine that I would end up doing the same thing daily for days on end, never really considering anything else as an option.  When my mental health really became an issue, that’s when I understood at the basest of levels that I needed to do something about my thoughts. 

Enter years of working through things, trying natural alternatives, trying pharmaceutical alternatives, faking belief in myself, becoming different people (including mirroring those around me), and learning to understand that I was really everyone else but myself.  As I peeled those layers away, I started finding things that I liked and understanding more about who I am and what I want—honoring my talents.  I really began to understand that there is no other way to have a healthy life if our base structure, if the thing that generates our lives (the mind) is negative.  We can’t live in an unhealthy environment and expect ourselves to be healthy—and the main place we live is in our minds.  We need to monitor what goes on in our minds all the time.  I’m not saying to make the mind a fantasy land where we disassociate from reality, I’m saying we need to regulate our thoughts and choose what we allow.  We can allow positive thoughts and disallow negative thoughts.  In order to live a healthy life, we need an overall environment that supports health and that starts with our mind, the thoughts we think.

So when we decide to start on any type of journey to who we are, any type of health journey, we need to begin with the mind.  We need to make sure that we are setting ourselves up for success and that the very place we generate the ideas about what our lives can be is healthy and supportive.  It can be challenging to admit that we need to do a deep dive into who we are, it can be challenging to accept responsibility for what’s around us—but it can be done.  And it needs to be done in order to follow through with anything.  The hardest part is learning patience for ourselves as we navigate new waters so to speak.  Learning to behave differently takes time.  Make sure we know what we are looking for, make sure we are familiar with ourselves and what we hope to do—and always make the first goal of any journey one of creating stability and power within our thought processes.  It will make all the difference in keeping the focus clear.  A healthy life starts with a healthy mind.